Portfolio / Red Bull Studios Pencil Logo

For this project, we were approached by graphic design studio MTWTF to fabricate a rather unusual sign they were designing for Red Bull Studios. MTWTF had worked with Red Bull before, designing a version of their iconic logo made up of thousands of sheets of laser cut paper for the Red Bull Music Academy.

Located in Chelsea, Red Bull Studios New York is a multi-disciplinary project space with recording studios, a radio broadcast booth, and space for performances, exhibitions and lectures. Many of these spaces feature versions of the Red Bull logo in different materials. For this iteration, instead of paper MTWTF chose an equally intricate design made up of thousands of sharpened pencils.

In order to achieve the undulating topographical look of the design, we would need to cut the pencils down into different lengths. A custom pencil-cutting jig was made to accurately (and safely) feed the pencils through a bandsaw. After a lot of testing, we found a drill diameter that could generate a hole that would tightly hold the pencil once installed, but also allow us to insert the dense arrangement of sharpened pencils by hand (without too many punctured fingertips). We then used the CNC router drill all the holes into the birch plywood base before cutting out the overall forms of the lettering and Red Bull logo.

Images of the installed project provided courtesy of MTWTF and Red Bull.